There’s no doubt Steve Alford meets one of the most essential job requirements to become the latest successor to UCLA coach John Wooden, whose legacy of 10 NCAA championships in 12 years has haunted Bruins basketball almost as much as fueling it through nearly four decades since his retirement.

“I’m very comfortable with the pressure,” Alford said Saturday, on a teleconference to discuss his hiring as UCLA coach. “I’ve been under pressure since I was 16. My high school gym seats 10,000 and we sold it out 8 times when I was a senior.

“You’re not going to find anybody that’s any more competitive than I am, or committed toward excellence. The promise has always been: put an incredible product on the floor. It is about a program.”

Pressure? He played for Bob Knight, for goodness sakes, at Indiana as a star freshman and as a senior who, in 1987, carried the Hoosiers to their most recent NCAA championship. He played for Knight in the 1984 Olympic Games, surrounded by future Hall of Famers such as Michael Jordan, Chris Mullin and Patrick Ewing and a lot of people wondering if he made the team only because he was Knight’s pet project.

Alford was a head coach at 26, bossing around players nearly the same age. And Saturday morning, he had to make the decision to uproot his family from the place that had become home and tell a group of New Mexico players he deeply cared about that he’d been made an offer he couldn’t refuse.

“It has been a difficult morning,” Alford said, which is not usually among the first statements a coach makes after accepting what many in the business would describe as a dream job. It is to his credit that he never, while expressing typical reverence for the late John Wooden and the legacy he constructed, used that particular phrase.

“Most of the conversations have just been within the family, because it was going to be a family decision. We were extremely happy here. I’m not a coach that is coming to another stop that was unhappy. I was about as happy as you could be. That’s why it was a difficult decision.”

Understand Alford is an exceptional coach. There’s no doubt he had one of the best jobs in the Mountain West given New Mexico’s extraordinary community support, but he restored the Lobos to their rightful place near—or, in his case, at— the top of the conference. They won 24 games in his first season and finished first four times in six years. At Iowa, he twice won the Big Ten Tournament.

It is easy enough to look at an unimpressive NCAA Tournament record and snap to the judgment that he’s nothing special. He has one Sweet 16 on his resume in 18 Division I seasons.

But college basketball history is littered with failed coaches hired off the glamour of one or two exceptional tournament runs, whether or not the coach owned obvious talent or was a fit for his new job.

That’s the real issue Alford will have to conquer, though. Not whether he can handle the pressure, and not whether he’s a capable coach. But whether he is an improvement—or even a substantial change—from the coach who preceded him, Ben Howland.

In his time as Iowa coach, Alford twice led the Hawkeyes to Big Ten Tournament championships. He recruited such fine in-state players as forward Greg Brunner and guard Jeff Horner. He compiled a 25-9 record in his penultimate season. And he simply could not get Hawkeyes fans on his side.

“I’ve never seen a coach so disliked by his own fan base as Steve Alford. For whatever reason,” said Larry Cotlar, radio host at KBGG in Des Moines. “It was almost like they wanted him to lose so they could get rid of him. A lot of people just did not like him. I never understood that mentality.”

Alford got the message and left for an excellent job in a lesser league, New Mexico of the Mountain West Conference, in 2007. His time there has been filled with victories, conference championships and not a ton of NCAA Tournament advancement, only two victories spread over six years.

So that’s what makes the hiring of Alford by UCLA just a little bit curious.

The Bruins had an elite coach who is perceived by many as aloof, and whose recent NCAA Tournament record was not stellar, who won his conference during the 2012-13 regular season and then lost his first tournament game. They fired Ben Howland.

Dipping deeper into the candidate pool than they might have imagined, they found an elite coach who is perceived by many as aloof, and whose recent NCAA Tournament record was not stellar, who won his conference during the 2012-13 regular season and then lost his first tournament game. They hired Steve Alford.

Alford, 48, already has compiled a 463-235 record. Were he to coach another 20 years and achieve the same win rate as in his six years at New Mexico—probably a requirement if he’s going to spend that long coaching the Bruins—he would threaten the 1,000-victory mark.

That Alford is not UCLA’s first choice hardly matters at all. John Groce was not Illinois’ first target but quite clearly was the best choice, and his first-year success with the Illini is only the start of what he might achieve in Champaign. The same could be said for Sean Miller at Arizona. Members of the administration at U of A in 2009 happened upon him almost by accident, which said more about them than it did Miller.

It’s not about whether Alford can recruit Southern California. He pulled Lobos stars Kendall Williams and Tony Snell out of the region, and those are just the examples from this season’s team. Athletic director Dan Guerrero tried to sell Alford as a coach who favored “up-tempo” basketball. UNM was 172nd in scoring offense this season. Not exactly “Showtime.” It is partly about that.

Mostly it’s a matter of whether UCLA fans choose to embrace Alford in a way they never really did Howland, despite the three Final Fours and the recruitment of Kevin Love, Russell Westbrook and Arron Afflalo. That’s where the real pressure lies.